/*
 * Copyright (c) 2000 World Wide Web Consortium,
 * (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Institut National de
 * Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique, Keio University). All
 * Rights Reserved. This program is distributed under the W3C's Software
 * Intellectual Property License. This program is distributed in the
 * hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even
 * the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
 * PURPOSE.
 * See W3C License http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/ for more details.
 */

package org.w3c.dom;

/**
 * CDATA sections are used to escape blocks of text containing characters that
 * would otherwise be regarded as markup. The only delimiter that is recognized
 * in a CDATA section is the "]]&gt;" string that ends the CDATA section. CDATA
 * sections cannot be nested. Their primary purpose is for including material
 * such as XML fragments, without needing to escape all the delimiters. <p>The
 * <code>DOMString</code> attribute of the <code>Text</code> node holds the
 * text that is contained by the CDATA section. Note that this may contain
 * characters that need to be escaped outside of CDATA sections and that,
 * depending on the character encoding ("charset") chosen for serialization, it
 * may be impossible to write out some characters as part of a CDATA section.
 * <p> The <code>CDATASection</code> interface inherits from the
 * <code>CharacterData</code> interface through the <code>Text</code>
 * interface. Adjacent <code>CDATASection</code> nodes are not merged by use
 * of the <code>normalize</code> method of the <code>Node</code> interface.
 * Because no markup is recognized within a <code>CDATASection</code>,
 * character numeric references cannot be used as an escape mechanism when
 * serializing. Therefore, action needs to be taken when serializing a
 * <code>CDATASection</code> with a character encoding where some of the
 * contained characters cannot be represented. Failure to do so would not
 * produce well-formed XML.One potential solution in the serialization process
 * is to end the CDATA section before the character, output the character using
 * a character reference or entity reference, and open a new CDATA section for
 * any further characters in the text node. Note, however, that some code
 * conversion libraries at the time of writing do not return an error or
 * exception when a character is missing from the encoding, making the task of
 * ensuring that data is not corrupted on serialization more difficult. <p>See
 * also the <a
 * href='http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-DOM-Level-2-Core-20001113'>Document
 * Object Model (DOM) Level 2 Core Specification</a>.
 */
public interface CDATASection extends Text
{
}
